#Resource Extraction

[allthecanadianpolitics]

The most significant legislation from Ontario's Progressive Conservatives since winning their third straight majority is a sweeping bill that Premier Doug Ford says will protect the economy from tariffs but which critics say will gut environmental protection. Bill 5, also known as the Protect Ontario by Unleashing our Economy Act, is making its way through Queen's Park and could become law before the legislature breaks for the summer on June 5. The Ford government's public justification for the bill is making major infrastructure and resource extraction projects happen faster by reducing delays and eliminating duplication in the approval process.

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Tagging: @newsfromstolenland

[alwaysbewoke]

[quixoticanarchy]

“This system of severity of exploitation of poor people of color at the bottom of global supply chains goes back centuries. Few people sitting for breakfast in England in the 1700s knew that their tea was sweetened by sugar harvested under brutal conditions by African slaves toiling in the West Indies. The slaves remained far removed from the British breakfast table until a band of abolitionists placed the true picture of slavery directly in front of the English people. Stakeholders fought to maintain the system. They told the British public not to trust what they were told. They espoused the great humanity of the slave trade—Africans were not suffering, they were being “saved” from the savagery of the dark continent. They argued that Africans worked in pleasing conditions on the islands. When those arguments failed, the slavers claimed they made changes that remedied the offenses taking place on the plantations. After all, who was going to go all the way to the West Indies and prove otherwise, and even if they did, who would believe them?

The truth, however, was this—but for the demand for sugar and the immense profits accrued through the sale of it, the entire slavery-for-sugar economy would not have existed. Furthermore, the inevitable outcome of stripping humans of their dignity, security, wages, and freedom can only be a system that results in the complete dehumanization of the people exploited at the bottom of the chain.

Today’s tech barons will tell you a similar tale about cobalt. They will tell you that they uphold international human rights norms and that their particular supply chains are clean. They will also assure you that conditions are not as bad as they seem and that they are bringing commerce, wages, education, and development to the poorest people of Africa (“saving” them). They will also assure you that they have implemented changes to remedy the problems on the ground, at least at the mines from which they say they buy cobalt. After all, who is going to go all the way to the Congo and prove otherwise, and even if they did, who would believe them?

The truth, however, is this—but for their demand for cobalt and the immense profits they accrue through the sale of smartphones, tablets, laptops, and electric vehicles, the entire blood-for-cobalt economy would not exist. Furthermore, the inevitable outcome of a lawless scramble for cobalt in an impoverished and war-torn country can only be the complete dehumanization of the people exploited at the bottom of the chain.

So much time has passed; so little has changed.”

— from Cobalt Red, Siddharth Kara

[mindblowingscience]

The extraction of the Earth's natural resources tripled in the past five decades, related to the massive build-up of infrastructure in many parts of the world and the high levels of material consumption, especially in upper-middle and high-income countries. Material extraction is expected to rise by 60% by 2060 and could derail efforts to achieve not only global climate, biodiversity, and pollution targets but also economic prosperity and human well-being, according to a report published today by the UN Environment Program (UNEP)-hosted International Resource Panel.

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[anarchistfrogposting]

I don't consider myself an anarchist but i'm pretty sympathetic, there's just some stuff i'm not sure yet would work well under anarchism as i understood it after reading the bread book.

What would incentivize people to work, for example, at oil rigs away from their communities doing dangerous work?

Would it be that they'd have a smaller expectation for how long they're suposed to work? Like, instead of you working 9-5 for 8 months instead you work 9-5 for 4 months and then can just do things you like the rest of the year?

Yes hi hello! This post re-emerged from the depths of accidental deletion!! I’m getting the bus to go get a burrito so let me talk about this one!!

Kropotkin actually talked about dangerous work; after all, some work is just inherently and unavoidably a bit more dangerous than others: so what’s the point? Why bother?

To start, resource extraction is going to be inherent to any industrial economy, but it’s worth pointing out that when you eliminate a lot of overproduction, an inefficiency inherent to capitalist economy, the demand for extraction is going to shoot down in a big way. That’s a big reason why a lot of the more hardcore environmentalist movements have been radical leftist ones; it’s features inherent to capitalism which are bringing about the downfall of the environment which sustains us.

Another big consideration to make is that a lot of the danger of these fields arises solely because the demands of the profit motive incentivise management to overwork/underpay/cut back on or wholesale eliminate critical safety measures; there’s a reason why unions and collectives in those fields are such critical players in the constant battle to keep people safe.

There are quite a few fields in the domestic/public sector, as well (think electricians, certain waste management professions etc.) which are (and were more so in the past) fairly dangerous but are not generally regarded as such because they’re regulated well in the public domain/have very strong unions/have otherwise strong safety regulation.

This stuff gets safer and safer as we improve the automation of our economy, as well.

It’s worth remembering as well that those remote professions and operations are, in a way, their own communities, as well, and for some people travelling long distances away for more lonesome work is quite an attractive prospect; I once knew a geologist who said he found the relative isolation quite peaceful. My great grandad did some remote mining and he always talked quite positively about it when I knew him (although this is very anecdotal - if anybody in the field wants to weigh in I’d be more than happy to hear what you think).

About hours as well;

If there’s no profit motive, then industrial processes are going to be driven by how to do them as safely, efficiently, and easily (among other stuff). The demand for hours is going to be a lot less tough because you’re going to be able to have more workers and source better equipment without worrying about how it will cut into your bottom line; so yes, the hours will be shorter and the shifts less demanding, with a greater support network and safety network when shit hits the fan. All of this, of course, makes this kind of work a lot more attractive.

But what about dangerous work in general? Why would anyone put themselves in danger?

You just have to look at the tremendous danger that volunteers face to understand that humans don’t really need a profit motive to put their lives on the line to better their communities and the world, or to feel part of something greater than themselves. Not everyone is going to want to do that, and that’s ok, but some people really derive a lot of happiness and fulfilment from dangerous work.

Humanity is flexible and diverse; working together to champion that is our strength, and it always has been.

[if-you-fan-a-fire]

"In these circumstances, the commercial economy of the fur trade soon yielded to industrial economies focused on mining, forestry, and fishing. The first industrial mining (for coal) began on Vancouver Island in the early 1850s, the first sizeable industrial sawmill opened a few years later, and fish canning began on the Fraser River in 1870. From these beginnings, industrial economies reached into the interstices of British Columbia, establishing work camps close to the resource, and processing centers (canneries, sawmills, concentrating mills) at points of intersection of external and local transportation systems. As the years went by, these transportation systems expanded, bringing ever more land (resources) within reach of industrial capital. Each of these developments was a local instance of David Harvey's general point that the pace of time-space compressions after 1850 accelerated capital's "massive, long-term investment in the conquest of space" (Harvey 1989, 264) and its commodifications of nature. The very soil, Marx said in another context, was becoming "part and parcel of capital" (1967, pt. 8, ch. 27).

As Marx and, subsequently, others have noted, the spatial energy of capitalism works to deterritorialize people (that is, to detach them from prior bonds between people and place) and to reterritorialize them in relation to the requirements of capital (that is, to land conceived as resources and freed from the constraints of custom and to labor detached from land). For Marx the

wholesale expropriation of the agricultural population from the soil... created for the town industries the necessary supply of a 'free' and outlawed proletariat (1967, pt. 8, ch. 27).

For Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari (1977) - drawing on insights from psychoanalysis - capitalism may be thought of as a desiring machine, as a sort of territorial writing machine that functions to inscribe "the flows of desire upon the surface or body of the earth" (Thomas 1994, 171-72). In Henri Lefebvre's terms, it produces space in the image of its own relations of production (1991; Smith 1990, 90). For David Harvey it entails the "restless formation and reformation of geographical landscapes," and postpones the effects of its inherent contradictions by the conquest of space-capitalism's "spatial fix" (1982, ch. 13; 1985, 150, 156). In detail, positions differ; in general, it can hardly be doubted that in British Columbia industrial capitalism introduced new relationships between people and with land and that at the interface of the native and the nonnative, these relationships created total misunderstandings and powerful new axes of power that quickly detached native people from former lands. When a Tlingit chief was asked by a reserve commissioner about the work he did, he replied

I don't know how to work at anything. My father, grandfather, and uncle just taught me how to live, and I have always done what they told me-we learned this from our fathers and grandfathers and our uncles how to do the things among ourselves and we teach our children in the same way.

Two different worlds were facing each other, and one of them was fashioning very deliberate plans for the reallocation of land and the reordering of social relations. In 1875 the premier of British Columbia argued that the way to civilize native people was to bring them into the industrial workplace, there to learn the habits of thrift, time discipline, and materialism. Schools were secondary. The workplace was held to be the crucible of cultural change and, as such, the locus of what the premier depicted as a politics of altruism intended to bring native people up to the point where they could enter society as full, participating citizens. To draw them into the workplace, they had to be separated from land. Hence, in the premier's scheme of things, the small reserve, a space that could not yield a livelihood and would eject native labor toward the industrial workplace and, hence, toward civilization. Marx would have had no illusions about what was going on: native lives, he would have said, were being detached from their own means of production (from the land and the use value of their own labor on it) and were being transformed into free (unencumbered) wage laborers dependent on the social relations of capital. The social means of production and of subsistence were being converted into capital. Capital was benefiting doubly, acquiring access to land freed by small reserves and to cheap labor detached from land.

The reorientation of land and labor away from older customary uses had happened many times before, not only in earlier settler societies, but also in the British Isles and, somewhat later, in continental Europe. There, the centuries-long struggles over enclosure had been waged between many ordinary folk who sought to protect customary use rights to land and landlords who wanted to replace custom with private property rights and market economies. In the western highlands, tenants without formal contracts (the great majority) could be evicted "at will." Their former lands came to be managed by a few sheep farmers; their intricate local land uses were replaced by sheep pasture (Hunter 1976; Hornsby 1992, ch. 2). In Windsor Forest, a practical vernacular economy that had used the forest in innumerable local ways was slowly eaten away as the law increasingly favored notions of absolute property ownership, backed them up with hangings, and left less and less space for what E.P. Thompson calls "the messy complexities of coincident use-right" (1975, 241). Such developments were approximately reproduced in British Columbia, as a regime of exclusive property rights overrode a fisher-hunter-gatherer version of, in historian Jeanette Neeson's phrase, an "economy of multiple occupations" (1984, 138; Huitema, Osborne, and Ripmeester 2002). Even the rhetoric of dispossession - about lazy, filthy, improvident people who did not know how to use land properly - often sounded remarkably similar in locations thousands of miles apart (Pratt 1992, ch. 7). There was this difference: The argument against custom, multiple occupations, and the constraints of life worlds on the rights of property and the free play of the market became, in British Columbia, not an argument between different economies and classes (as it had been in Britain) but the more polarized, and characteristically racialized juxtaposition of civilization and savagery...

Moreover, in British Columbia, capital was far more attracted to the opportunities of native land than to the surplus value of native labor. In the early years, when labor was scarce, it sought native workers, but in the longer run, with its labor needs supplied otherwise (by Chinese workers contracted through labor brokers, by itinerant white loggers or miners), it was far more interested in unfettered access to resources. A bonanza of new resources awaited capital, and if native people who had always lived amid these resources could not be shipped away, they could be-indeed, had to be-detached from them. Their labor was useful for a time, but land in the form of fish, forests, and minerals was the prize, one not to be cluttered with native-use rights. From the perspective of capital, therefore, native people had to be dispossessed of their land. Otherwise, nature could hardly be developed. An industrial primary resource economy could hardly function.

In settler colonies, as Marx knew, the availability of agricultural land could turn wage laborers back into independent producers who worked for themselves instead of for capital (they vanished, Marx said, "from the labor market, but not into the workhouse") (1967, pt. 8, ch. 33). As such, they were unavailable to capital, and resisted its incursions, the source, Marx thought, of the prosperity and vitality of colonial societies. In British Columbia, where agricultural land was severely limited, many settlers were closely implicated with capital, although the objectives of the two were different and frequently antagonistic. Without the ready alternative of pioneer farming, many of them were wage laborers dependent on employment in the industrial labor market, yet often contending with capital in bitter strikes. Some of them sought to become capitalists. In M. A. Grainger's Woodsmen of the West, a short, vivid novel set in early modern British Columbia, the central character, Carter, wrestles with this opportunity. Carter had grown up on a rock farm in Nova Scotia, worked at various jobs across the continent, and fetched up in British Columbia at a time when, for a nominal fee, the government leased standing timber to small operators. He acquired a lease in a remote fjord and there, with a few men under towering glaciers at the edge of the world economy, attacked the forest. His chances were slight, but the land was his opportunity, his labor his means, and he threw himself at the forest with the intensity of Captain Ahab in pursuit of the white whale. There were many Carters.

But other immigrants did become something like Marx's independent producers. They had found a little land on the basis of which they hoped to get by, avoid the work relations of industrial capitalism, and leave their progeny more than they had known themselves. Their stories are poignant. A Czech peasant family, forced from home for want of land, finding its way to one of the coaltowns of southeastern British Columbia, and then, having accumulated a little cash from mining, homesteading in the province's arid interior. The homestead would consume a family's work while yielding a living of sorts from intermittent sales from a dry wheat farm and a large measure of domestic self-sufficiency-a farm just sustaining a family, providing a toe-hold in a new society, and a site of adaptation to it. Or, a young woman from a brick, working-class street in Derby, England, coming to British Columbia during the depression years before World War I, finding work up the coast in a railway hotel in Prince Rupert, quitting with five dollars to her name after a manager's amorous advances, traveling east as far as five dollars would take her on the second train out of Prince Rupert, working in a small frontier hotel, and eventually marrying a French Canadian farmer. There, in a northern British Columbian valley, in a context unlike any she could have imagined as a girl, she would raise a family and become a stalwart of a diverse local society in which no one was particularly well off. Such stories are at the heart of settler colonialism (Harris 1997, ch. 8).

The lives reflected in these stories, like the productions of capital, were sustained by land. Older regimes of custom had been broken, in most cases by enclosures or other displacements in the homeland several generations before emigration. Many settlers became property owners, holders of land in fee simple, beneficiaries of a landed opportunity that, previously, had been unobtainable. But use values had not given way entirely to exchange values, nor was labor entirely detached from land. Indeed, for all the work associated with it, the pioneer farm offered a temporary haven from capital. The family would be relatively autonomous (it would exploit itself). There would be no outside boss. Cultural assumptions about land as a source of security and family-centered independence; assumptions rooted in centuries of lives lived elsewhere seemed to have found a place of fulfillment. Often this was an illusion - the valleys of British Columbia are strewn with failed pioneer farms - but even illusions drew immigrants and occupied them with the land.

In short, and in a great variety of ways, British Columbia offered modest opportunities to ordinary people of limited means, opportunities that depended, directly or indirectly, on access to land. The wage laborer in the resource camp, as much as the pioneer farmer, depended on such access, as, indirectly, did the shopkeeper who relied on their custom.

In this respect, the interests of capital and settlers converged. For both, land was the opportunity at hand, an opportunity that gave settler colonialism its energy. Measured in relation to this opportunity, native people were superfluous. Worse, they were in the way, and, by one means or another, had to be removed. Patrick Wolfe is entirely correct in saying that "settler societies were (are) premised on the elimination of native societies," which, by occupying land of their ancestors, had got in the way (1999, 2). If, here and there, their labor was useful for a time, capital and settlers usually acquired labor by other means, and in so doing, facilitated the uninhibited construction of native people as redundant and expendable. In 1840 in Oxford, Herman Merivale, then a professor of political economy and later a permanent undersecretary at the Colonial Office, had concluded as much. He thought that the interests of settlers and native people were fundamentally opposed, and that if left to their own devices, settlers would launch wars of extermination. He knew what had been going on in some colonies - "wretched details of ferocity and treachery" - and considered that what he called the amalgamation (essentially, assimilation through acculturation and miscegenation) of native people into settler society to be the only possible solution (1928, lecture xviii). Merivale's motives were partly altruistic, yet assimilation as colonial practice was another means of eliminating "native" as a social category, as well as any land rights attached to it as, everywhere, settler colonialism would tend to do.

These different elements of what might be termed the foundational complex of settler colonial power were mutually reinforcing. When, in 1859, a first large sawmill was contemplated on the west coast of Vancouver Island, its manager purchased the land from the Crown and then, arriving at the intended mill site, dispersed its native inhabitants at the point of a cannon (Sproat 1868). He then worried somewhat about the proprieties of his actions, and talked with the chief, trying to convince him that, through contact with whites, his people would be civilized and improved. The chief would have none of it, but could stop neither the loggers nor the mill. The manager and his men had debated the issue of rights, concluding (in an approximation of Locke) that the chief and his people did not occupy the land in any civilized sense, that it lay in waste for want of labor, and that if labor were not brought to such land, then the worldwide progress of colonialism, which was "changing the whole surface of the earth," would come to a halt. Moreover, and whatever the rights or wrongs, they assumed, with unabashed self-interest, that colonists would keep what they had got: "this, without discussion, we on the west coast of Vancouver Island were all prepared to do." Capital was establishing itself at the edge of a forest within reach of the world economy, and, in so doing, was employing state sanctioned property rights, physical power, and cultural discourse in the service of interest."

- Cole Harris, “How Did Colonialism Dispossess? Comments from an Edge of Empire,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers, Vol. 94, No. 1 (Mar., 2004), p. 172-174.

[shrinkrants]

[ignotussomnium]

Looking into tourism as a method of resource extraction. If anyone has recommendations for articles or books that talk about similar subjects, I would greatly appreciate it.

[raffaellopalandri]

Book of the Day - Less is More

Today’s Book of the Day is Less Is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World, written by Jason Hickel in 2021 and published by Windmill Books. Jason Hickel is an economic anthropologist, author, professor, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. His research focuses on global political economy, inequality, and ecological economics. Less is More, by Jason Hickel I have chosen this book because…

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[quixoticanarchy]

Finished reading Cobalt Red by Siddharth Kara and he does a good job showing how the cobalt supply chain is inextricable from incredible human suffering, near-slavery, rampant exploitation, environmental devastation, and child labor. And it’s very clear that no promise a tech or battery manufacturer makes that their supply chain is clean means literally anything bc industrially and artisanally mined cobalt are mixed into the same supply untraceably. And the book also covers the fact that cobalt supplies are finite and when the DRC’s cobalt is exhausted the industry will move elsewhere, rinse and repeat, and the people in the Congo will be left with the ongoing and unremediated -maybe irremediable - damage. All of this so that we can have smartphones, electric vehicles, iPads, electric scooters, almost anything with a rechargeable battery.

It’s also clear that the tech and battery industries are interested in good PR and making empty statements about human rights when they should be taking responsibility for the working conditions of small-scale miners (and minors) dying at the bottom of their supply chains. What Kara doesn’t really address is the demand side of this equation, not just the demand by companies whose products use cobalt-containing batteries but also the consumers sustaining that demand, who buy every new smartphone and eagerly pin their hopes on electric vehicles to let us keep our car-dependent world without the fossil fuel guilt. The book takes it for granted that cobalt will be required in high quantities for consumer electronics and for “green” tech, and to some extent this is true - as in, none of those demands or uses will cease overnight and in the meantime we should worry about how to address industrial and business practices and government corruption in order to treat Congolese miners as human beings.

But it feels incomplete without also asking questions like: should that demand continue? Can it? Do we need this many devices? What costs are acceptable? Can we really have our cake (smartphones, EVs, etc) and eat it too (slavery-free, non-exploitative supply chains that don’t kill the people at the bottom and lay waste to the environment)? What if - as the book would seem to suggest - we really cannot? If one goal of the book is for people to realize what conditions underlie the extraction of cobalt, what action is then incumbent upon us? Personal consumer choice will not undo all this harm, but it is a necessary step in rethinking or attempting other ways to live. Is it a right to have a smartphone, a new one every year or two, if it comes at the price of other people’s human rights? At what point do we say that it is not an acceptable cost that the extractive industries are perpetuating neocolonialism and near-slavery in order that we should have comfortable lives?

We know we have to stop relying on fossil fuels or we’ll burn down the planet (to a greater degree than is already locked in) but the “green energy transition” is not clean at all. Capitalism seeks the lowest price for labor and the highest profits; obviously these extractive relationships owe a lot of their horror to being conducted in a capitalist milieu. But even thinking about, say, a socialist world instead, if it aspires to still provide smartphones and electric vehicles en masse and maintain the comforts and conveniences of the “Western” lifestyle then we would still be relying on massive amounts of resource extraction with no guarantee of less suffering. The devices are themselves part of the problem. The demand for them and the extent to which “modern” life in “developed” countries relies upon them is part of the problem. It is unsustainable. It is built on blood and it makes a mockery of purported values of dignity, equality, and human rights. The lives of Congolese cobalt miners are tied to how we in the “developed” or colonizer countries live and consume. I do not think their lives will change substantially unless ours do.

[zomb13s]

Escaping the Burning Building: Why Humanity Must Look to the Stars for Survival and Prosperity

Picture yourself trapped in a burning building. Flames close in from every direction, and the heat becomes unbearable. Amidst the chaos, there’s one thing driving you forward: saving the children, the future of humanity. The urgency, the responsibility, and the desperation to escape are all-consuming. This scene isn’t just about survival—it’s a powerful metaphor for our current reality on Earth.…

[emptyanddark]

Local ecosystems and their inhabitants are sacrificed for global climate ambitions in the race for dominance over transition minerals. The scale and methods of mining operations in northern Chile are just one example of where a unique ecosystem and the ways of life of local communities are traded off for green growth.

...

Uruguayan writer and journalist Eduardo Galeano wrote in the late 1980s about the situation on the continent of Latin America. 'This is the region of open veins. Everything, from its discovery to our time, has always been transmuted into European - or later U.S. - capital, and as such has accumulated in distant centers of power.' The situation of lithium confirms that this colonial-imperialist way of doing business operates in a green jacket today.

[if-you-fan-a-fire]

"Who says Canada's buffalo are extinct? Here is a scene from Goose Lake, near Wainright, Alta, showing a part of the great herd on the government reserve there. Science is attempting to cross-breed these buffalo with cattle to produce a hard milch-cow for northern climes.

////

Another visit from US financiers to Canada's gold mines in Northern Ontario has been made, this time vis aeroplane. Gene Tunney, retired undefeated heavyweight champion of the world, was one of the party of 11, some of whom are shown at top. Col. W. A. Bishop, Canada's war ace, was also member of the party which included a number of prominent shining men. In the group shown at the top are, left to right - D. M. McKeon, New York financier; Col. W. A. Bishop; B. F. Smith, New York, financier; Gene Tunney, David Sloan, Vancouver, managing director of the Plonser mine, P. S. Arguimbau, New York financier; Eddle Dowling, comedian and singer, New York and Paris: and Heard P. Gimpel, of the New York department store bearing his name. In the lower picture at left is a close-up of Tunney, twice conqueror of Jack Dempsy for the world's heavyweight boxing title, now wealthy business man and politician. At right is shown, left to right - J. P. Bickell, president of McIntyre Mines, from whose home in Port Credit, Ontario, the party left; Ed Flynn, prominent New York politician and friend of President Roosevelt, and Hon. Chas. McCrae, Ontario minister of mines. The party bound for McIntyre mines near Timmins, Ontario."

- from the Kingston Whig-Standard. June 26, 1933. Page 10.

[shrinkrants]

eight of the top 11 child care businesses in the country are now owned by private-equity firms. Many of these firms recently lobbied against a broad-based federal child care benefit because, as one noted, it could “place downward pressure on the tuition and fees we charge” and “adversely affect our revenues.” It resulted in higher fees and worse care for families and abysmal wages for workers. This is classic corporate extraction, with an economic toll topping $200 billion a year. Ms. Harris (and Congress) could end it by closing the carried-interest loophole as part of the looming tax fight next year. -- Jen Harris in The New York Times

[colitcomedia]

Exploring how Arrowsmith North Silica Sand Project by VRX Silica advances?

Discover the notable progress made by VRX Silica Limited (ASX: VRX) in the approval process for the Arrowsmith North Silica Sand Project. Learn about the commencement of the Public Environmental Review (PER) period and the company's dedication to addressing stakeholder feedback. Get insights into VRX Silica's investor outlook and explore the projects within their expansive silica sand portfolio in Western Australia.

When it comes to sustainable silica sand projects, VRX Silica Limited is making significant strides. With the initiation of the four-week Public Environmental Review (PER) period, following the publication of the Environmental Review Document (ERD), VRX Silica's Arrowsmith North Silica Sand Project is advancing closer to reality.

The acceptance of the Arrowsmith North Environmental Review Document by the Department of Water and Environmental Regulation (DWER) further demonstrates the company's commitment to transparency and environmental responsibility.

During the PER process, VRX Silica understands the importance of addressing all comments received regarding the Arrowsmith North Silica Sand Project proposal. This comprehensive review and response stage serves as the final step before the Environmental Protection Authority (EPA) of Western Australia prepares an assessment report. The recommendations made in the report will play a crucial role in the approval decision by the Western Australian Environment Minister.

Investor Outlook:

VRX Silica's commitment to sustainability and responsible resource extraction has captured the attention of investors. With a share price of AUD 0.125 per share and a 52-week range of AUD 0.093 to AUD 0.190 per share, the company's performance in the market has been notable. As of June 19th, 2023, VRX Silica has a market capitalization of AUD 70 million, with 560.40 million shares issued.

About VRX Silica:

VRX Silica Limited is an ASX-listed pure-play silica sand company with a dedicated focus on driving innovation and sustainable practices. The company's portfolio comprises four silica sand projects in Western Australia. In addition to the Arrowsmith North Silica Sand Project, they also have the Arrowsmith Central Silica Sand Project, located near Eneabba, south of Geraldton. Furthermore, VRX Silica has the Muchea Silica Sand Project, situated north of Perth, and the Boyatup Silica Sand Project, positioned 100 km east of Esperance.

Conclusion:

The Arrowsmith North Silica Sand Project by VRX Silica is making significant progress in its approval process, evident through the commencement of the PER period and the publication of the ERD. By addressing stakeholder feedback and adhering to sustainable practices, VRX Silica is laying a strong foundation for the project's success. With their robust investor outlook and dedication to responsible resource extraction, VRX Silica continues to shape the future of the silica sand industry in Western Australia.